Auditor-General Sheila Fraser has exposed a scandal within the Department of Justice of Enronesque proportions.
For years, the department has been perpetrating a fraud on the Parliament and people of Canada, hiding the true costs of the National Firearms Registry as they spiralled more than 400 times beyond the first estimate.
And the Auditor-General blames this chaos in part on an antigun ethic within the program that sees weapons possession of any kind as "a questionable activity" that needs to be rigorously controlled.
"If you look at the report there's no wrongdoing at all," Justice Minister Martin Cauchon insisted yesterday. Criminal wrongdoing, no. But as for incompetence and deception -- well, you be the judge.
In 1994, when Allan Rock, the justice minister at the time, introduced the Canadian Firearms Program, he projected the net cost of licensing gun owners and registering every long gun in the country to be $2-million (about $119- million to implement, offset by $117-million in fees). The Department of Justice now estimates that the net cost will be $860-million through 2005 (or $1-billion in costs offset by $140-million in fees). The Auditor-General doubts even this figure is accurate, though, since she reports that the department's books are in such a mess that a complete assessment of costs is impossible.
How could a program go so far wrong, so fast? The Justice Department offers a litany of excuses. The government expected the provinces to co-operate in establishing the system -- a tad naïve, since several of them challenged the legality of the registry in court.
Fees were supposed to cover the costs of the program. But to lessen outrage, the fees were reduced and often refunded. The department also somewhat underestimated the cost of processing the forms. They put one estimate at $5.50 a form. It turned out to be $23.75.
The government also expected gun owners to apply for their licences and permits early and properly. But the forms were so badly designed that 90 per cent of them were incorrectly filled out, and gun owners hate the program so much they have waited until the last minute to file, causing huge backlogs.
All this is simple incompetence. What makes the affair so contemptible is the contempt in which the government held Parliament. From the very beginning, the Justice Department and the government itself used every conceivable means to hide many of the cost overruns, deceiving the House of Commons in order to prevent it from exercising its right to scrutinize and criticize government expenditures.
Some of the Justice Department's deceptions were breathtaking. In May of 2000 the department told a parliamentary committee that the program's costs had escalated to $327-million. Internally, the department was warning the government that costs would exceed $1-billion.
In one ingenious slush fund, the department set aside $126-million to help Correctional Services Canada and the National Parole Board adapt to the program's requirements, without bothering to tell Parliament. Then the department redirected all but $7-million of that fund back into the program.
The department also conspired to hide the registry's true costs by offloading them to other programs, and by financing 70 per cent of the program through supplementary estimates, which are only supposed to cover unanticipated expenses.
At the heart of this deception, however, was an antigun attitude within the program itself. The registry was initially supposed to focus on a small minority of gun owners who posed a risk to society. Instead, by the department's own admission, the focus changed "to excessive regulation and enforcement of controls over all owners," making it "difficult for owners to comply with the program."
And here is the sentence justifying every conspiracy theorist who argues the purpose of the registry is ultimately to confiscate the nation's firearms.
"The department said the excessive regulation had occurred [in part]because some of the program partners believed that the use of firearms is in itself a 'questionable activity' that required strong controls."
Space does not permit a full explanation of the foul-ups accompanying the selection of a computer to manage the registry. Suffice it to say the department has concluded the three-year-old machine is "expensive, inflexible, out-of-date and could not be modified at a reasonable cost." All or part of it will have to be replaced.
There is more to pore over, more to explore, much, much more to decry. But we know this much. This Liberal government sold us a bill of goods on the firearms registry. They low-balled the estimates, and when the estimates rose, they hid the problem.
They lied to us.
John Ibbitson